Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#11
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's room for more than one player in the market here, it's a super important sort of tool where the open source versions are all pretty mediocre. OSS solutions tend to be statically configured, which non-engineers don't tend to have access or ability to configure. That's not to say you couldn't OSS something here, but it'd be a real effort to host.

I'd also add that what we're interested in is not just feature flags, but the use of feature flags for A/B testing - which translates to a few key differences in how you build and optimize the product. A few things: 1. More sophisticated targeting; i.e., different types of objects, combinations of attributes, and groups. 2. Airship's pricing model is aligned with customers' incentive to grow. Our architecture emphasi…

Yeah, the product looks super cool, congratulations on the launch. Definitely have work cut out for you to compete with launchdarkly, but it feels like the market penetration for such services is currently on the low end either way. Pricing plans allowing for more experimentation definitely give you an edge here (and definitely make me want to try out the project in my own side projects).

The pricing partially based on API calls feels somewhat vague though, it's tough to have any idea what an API call is in airship, especially given the abstraction level of the client where you explicitly remove the API from the sight of the developer. .1ms timings suggests it's not per flag, but then I see "Every time you check whether a User or an object should clear a particular gate". With that context 10,000 (or 75,000) seems very low - with 30 feature flags on a page you'd only be able to load 300 pages total across all users. It doesn't feel like I can judge how the API limits translate to real world usage, even though I do see the notes on the pricing page.

One thing I might recommend for the future as a killer feature is considering tooling around application performance between two cohorts. I've definitely seen cases where toggling a feature flag changes performance from 100ms to 800ms and nobody bats an eye because most small (and probably most large) organizations have crummy performance monitoring/tooling (PMs would probably love this too for projects with explicit performance goals).

What's the expected time in Airship for clients to pick up new configurations currently?

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#13
post #7

I really like the product (and may use it!), but the landing page is very confusing. You get to the meat of the issue in your HN comment, but I see very little of that on the landing page.

Thank you - that's helpful feedback. We'll improve the marketing page with some more details in the next iteration.

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#14
While I'd love to test out Airship, not being able to do that without signing up is pretty much a non-starter for me. When I say pretty much, I can often be persuaded with having at least the documentation available without signing up. For example Logrocket (https://logrocket.com/) needs signing up, but the documentation is all there and I can immediately see the effects it will have on my app if applied.

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#15
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's room for more than one player in the market here, it's a super important sort of tool where the open source versions are all pretty mediocre. OSS solutions tend to be statically configured, which non-engineers don't tend to have access or ability to configure. That's not to say you couldn't OSS something here, but it'd be a real effort to host.

what are the open-source alternatives, if you don't mind me asking?

Trebuchet is another https://github.com/airbnb/trebuchet

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#16
post #10

Wanted to drop in a quick review of Airship (disclaimer: I got to know the founders through the experience of being early users). We, at Repl.it, started using it for a very risky rewrite of a core part of our product -- the IDE ( https://repl.it/site/blog/ide ) -- and it helped us roll it out safely, turning it off when we needed to, when we get a user bug report Airship could quickly tell us if that user has the fe…

Thanks! We appreciate that!

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#17

SDK-only deployment or do you have an API that we can plug into a webapp? Wasn't mentioned too clearly on the site.

Thanks for asking about this. We don't expose our APIs at the moment - because the SDK is how we achieve extremely high performance / reliability. The SDKs do a lot of optimizations for you because a standard API round trip can be pretty slow.

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#18

SDK-only deployment or do you have an API that we can plug into a webapp? Wasn't mentioned too clearly on the site.

Also, colour me dense but I'm a marketer/PM and I can barely understand what's on the landing page. And there's no way that sales needs feature flagging.

I know it's early days but maybe slightly simpler copy where you tell me what feature flagging actually is?

On the flip side, I learned something pretty cool today! :-)

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#19
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's room for more than one player in the market here, it's a super important sort of tool where the open source versions are all pretty mediocre. OSS solutions tend to be statically configured, which non-engineers don't tend to have access or ability to configure. That's not to say you couldn't OSS something here, but it'd be a real effort to host.

what are the open-source alternatives, if you don't mind me asking?

This site has a pretty good survey of the open-source options in various languages: http://featureflags.io/feature-flags/ (you have to pick a language from the menu to get to the page specific to that language, as the page I linked to is more of an overview of the concept, and there doesn't seem to be one page that lists them all).

Re: Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features

#20
post #10

Wanted to drop in a quick review of Airship (disclaimer: I got to know the founders through the experience of being early users). We, at Repl.it, started using it for a very risky rewrite of a core part of our product -- the IDE ( https://repl.it/site/blog/ide ) -- and it helped us roll it out safely, turning it off when we needed to, when we get a user bug report Airship could quickly tell us if that user has the fe…

Cool service. Heads up, your Go version is really out of date with some potentially serious security holes. You should probably upgrade to 1.10
Post reply on HN